Shootings in Seattle

Cocoon no longer

A startling rampage among the coffee shops

POWERED by jobs at Amazon and Starbucks, Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, Seattle has become a famous brain-gain city. It attracts college-educated, mostly white incomers who cycle to work in the rain, attend the ballet in inordinate numbers and brood over iPhones in 1,640 coffee shops.

Until this spring their greener-than-thou, over-caffeinated lives were seldom stirred by the gun violence that intermittently roils much of America. Then the bullets started flying. A mass killing occurred in, of all places, a coffee shop. Suddenly, the smart city felt scary.

Nicole Westbrook, a culinary student who had just moved to Seattle from Albuquerque, New Mexico, was killed in late April by a bullet fired from a passing car. She was walking with her boyfriend in a district known for its art galleries. Justin Ferrari, a software engineer and water-polo coach, was shot in the head on May 24th while driving with his two children and his parents. He died in his father's arms, caught in the crossfire of a mid-afternoon gunfight. Two days later, outside the Northwest Folklife Festival in the city centre, a man carrying a book was shot in the leg by stray gunfire. Hours after that, gunmen sprayed 60 bullets at houses in south Seattle.

Violence became terror on the morning of May 30th, when Ian Stawicki, a 40-year-old with mental problems, walked into Cafe Racer, a coffee shop catering to hip musicians. He shot four people dead and fled across town. Hijacking a car, he killed its driver, a mother of two. The rampage ended in late afternoon when Mr Stawicki, with police closing in, shot himself in the head.

“What is going on?” a reporter asked the mayor, Mike McGinn, at a press conference convened in the panicky hours before the gunman was killed. Mr McGinn struggled to find a coherent answer. With five people murdered in one day, the number of Seattle homicides this year had jumped to 21, one more than the total for the whole of 2011.

“Seattleites, we are losing it,” wrote Danny Westneat in his column in the Seattle Times. Many agreed. But the city is a long way from lost. It is wealthy, well governed and relatively safe. For a big American city, its rates of murder and violent crime are low. (The police, though, often use excessive force, especially against non-whites, according to a report by the Justice Department in December.) What has been lost this spring is the sense of Seattle as a cosy cocoon.

City officials say the problem boils down to too many handguns, most of them legally owned. In Washington state, as across much of America, the number of licences for carrying a concealed weapon has surged in recent years. State and federal laws “make it too easy to acquire guns”, the mayor grumbled. The coffee-shop shooter had legally purchased at least six handguns, and his licence to pack heat was valid until 2015.